The creation and production of works such as motion pictures and television series is well known. Generally, raw footage (film or video) is shot with the actors over some period of time and the raw footage is subsequently edited, special effects created and incorporated and the final work produced. One of the problems with such creation and production processes is that they are largely linear, i.e.--all of the footage of the actors must be shot before editing and other post production activities are performed.
As this linearity increases the time required to produce the final work, it generally also increases the cost of making the work. Further, it is not unknown that as the editing and/or other post production activities are performed, problems are identified which require additional footage to be shot, which can incur significant expense, or which requires the director of the work to change the work, usually in otherwise undesired ways, when it is not possible to shoot new footage.
Various techniques are employed to mitigate these expenses and risks which result from this linearity and these include various continuity and storyboarding operations to manage the process of obtaining necessary footage and using "first units" and "second units" to obtain required footage in parallel, wherever possible.
To date, works created and produced with computer generated content have followed a process much like that for conventional film and video works for a variety of reasons. Thus, these works have been created and produced in a linear fashion wherein one activity is essentially completed before a second is commenced. For example, in a 3D animation the process of creating the 3D models will be completed, then the backgrounds and/or sets are completed and then the models are placed in the backgrounds and/or sets to allow the animations to be completed. This linearization of the creation and production process results in many of the same disadvantages as with the conventional video and film creation and production process discussed above.
Specifically, it results in long production times (e.g. the animators cannot start the animation of the models until the backgrounds and/or sets have been completed), and can result in significant errors/undesirable aspects remaining undetected until the final assembly of the various components (models, animation data, sets, etc.) of the work.
In such a case, depending upon the seriousness and/or type of the errors, various stages of the process may have to be re-performed. In some circumstances, such as the case wherein a set has to be changed, a large part of the creation process may have to be re-performed to accommodate the changes and models, animations, etc. may have to be modified. Often, these corrective modifications also have to be performed in a linear fashion, adding further to the expense and delays of correcting the work.
The present inventors have determined that computer generated works, including 2D and 3D animations and visual special effects, should be more susceptible to creation and production in a parallel manner than conventional works produced with real actors, sets, etc. While it is clear that a computer generated character (such as the T-Rex in Jurassic Park.TM.) can be placed in more than one scene at a time, to date systems for creating and producing computer generated works have not well supported this capability.
While some activities can be performed in parallel, such as when an animator works on a particular character while other animators work on other particular characters, the integration of these characters and/or components into the final work is often a problem. Very often characters and/or components will not "fit" with each other when the final work is assembled. For example, a component may not be the correct size, relative to other real or computer generated characters/components in the work, or an animated action for a character may "break" when an object or other character is not located at the location in the final scene where the animator thought it would be. Generally, changes in one portion of a computer generated work can affect one or more other portions of the work and to date no satisfactory solution has existed to manage these changes and thus parallel creative and production tasks have not been widely employed. ,
Further, due to the typical monolithic storage of a scene (e.g.--the set construction, animated models, animation data, lighting and other rendering information are all stored essentially as single entity), responsibility for a scene is often assigned to a single artist/user, who is said to "own" the scene. The owner of the scene must manage the scene to ensure that: all components of the scene are present; they correspond to one another as needed; and a component is not changed without consideration as to the effect of such changes on other components in the scene. Management of this task is difficult at best and scene owners often restrict access to one artist/user at a time.
It is desired to have a system and method for managing the creation and production of computer generated works such as 2D and 3D animations, special effects and the like which permits two or more users to collaborate on the work and/or components of the work at the same time and which manages the changes to portions of the work and the combining of components into the final work.